These words that I speak

These words I now write

These flat voweled phrases

These poems I indite 

 

This love of things dark

This love of things light

This fondness for nature 

This ease with the night 

 

These moments of joy

These moments of fear

These hands clenched in fists

These thoughts holding clear

 

This taste for fine wine

This taste for cheap beer

This inner confliction 

This worm in my ear

 

These traits are not just I

They linger from the past

In bone & blood they carry on

From the inaugural stone first cast

 

For, I am the many

From ancestral mould

Born out of coal dust

With an industrial soul

 

My lineage still whispers 

In blood and in gene

If a path wrongly taken

I would never have been

 

Sometimes, a strange phrase

I find myself speak

A voice lost in time

Perhaps found a small leak?

 

Am I not the product

Of the good & the bad

The black sheep, the family 

Wished they'd never had?

 

The child that is golden

The dreams never found

The whistle that turned

My Mother around?

 

The swing of the sixties 

The weeping guitar

The strumming of heartstrings 

Arranged in a scar?

 

The smile of my Father

The glint in his eye

The knowing we're of 

The same ilk him and I ?

 

What I know is,  I'm forged

From centuries of kin

Who laugh & then scream 

From somewhere within

 

But, at last we've matured 

To the finest of wine!

Tis I! I confess!

A vintage devine 😄